First of all, you can correct mistakes much more easily. One sweep of the palette-knife 'lifts' the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made; indeed the canvas is all the better for past impressions.

That’s something that every writer and probably every artist needs to figure out for themselves: at what point in their process to bring other eyes in, because it can be tricky to do it too soon. I am very susceptible to other people’s perspectives. I’m a Libra, I’m a woman. If someone else has a convincing point of view, it’s really easy for me to get onboard with it, and that can be threatening to my own vision for my work. I need to wait until my work has reached a certain integrity and I know what the skeleton and the foundation and the general thrust of it is.

No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.

I’m still working on it, especially with poems, The only way I’ve found to do any sort of editing is to rewrite or retype the whole thing. It’s a trick my friend Bud Smith taught me. The Bud Smith secret. All his secrets are just basically, you gotta do the thing. And that really worked for fiction. That’s how I redrafted my novel. Because it’s more than a room. It’s a giant city of rooms. With a poem, I think what’s fun in the revision process is just going through, cutting out a line, cutting out four lines, and seeing what happens.